Minimise the tentacles on the OctopOSS. Keep it simple
The following quick checklist will give you a feel for whether your OSS is too complex for general users: Who are the personas that interact with your OSS (give those personas names and attributes to give life to them) What are they trying to achieve with your OSS (what specific use cases do they fulfil) […]
Let’s say you act for a service provider and the diagram below represents the number of variations you could offer to customers – the number that are technically supported by your solution. That’s 13,824,000 colours. By comparison, the following diagram contains just 20 colours: If I asked you what colours are in the upper diagram, […]
I’ve been promising to release an OSS Call for Innovation, a manifesto of what OSS can become – a manifesto that also describes areas where exponential improvements are just waiting to happen . It can be found here: https://passionateaboutoss.com/oss-call-for-innovation/ And you’ll also notice that it’s a new top-level menu item here on PAOSS. Each time […]
OSS tend to be powerful software suites that can do millions of things. Experts at the vendors / integrators know how to pull the puppet’s strings and make it dance. As a reader of PAOSS, chances are that you are one of those experts. I’ve sat through countless vendor demonstrations, but I’m sure you’ll still […]
Have you ever noticed that almost every person who works in OSS is extremely clever? No? They may not know the stuff that you know or even talk in the same terminologies that you and your peers use, but chances are they also know lots of stuff that you don’t. OSS sets a very high […]
“When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.” […]
“One of the biggest insights we had was that we decided not to try to manage your music library on the iPod, but to manage it in iTunes. Other companies tried to do everything on the device itself and made it so complicated that it was useless.” Steve Jobs. How does this insight apply to […]
“Smart Data Discovery goes beyond data monitoring to help business users discover subtle and important factors and identify issues and patterns within the data so the organization can identify challenges and capitalize on opportunities. These tools allow business users to leverage sophisticated analytical techniques without the assistance of technical professionals or analysts. Users can perform advanced […]
The following extract from Ken Segall’s book, “Insanely Simple,” provides a great story on persuasion: “At one agency meeting with Steve Jobs, we were reviewing the content of a proposed iMac commercial when a debate arose about how much we should say in the commercial. The creative team was arguing that it would work best […]
This post is about the most inspiring OSS book I’ve ever read, and yet it doesn’t contain a single word that is directly about OSS (so clearly I’m not spruiking my own OSS-centric book here 😉 ). It’s a book that outlines the resolutions to so many of the challenges being faced by traditional communications […]
OSS business case evaluators routinely ask many questions that relate to key metrics like return on investment, capital to be outlaid, expected returns, return on investment, and more of the same circular financial questions. 🙂 They do also ask a few technical questions to decide risk – of doing the project or not doing the […]
“Today’s consumers want to get the best prices, but offering your brand at a discount can undermine profits and threaten viability. Smart brands utilize strategies to create and sustain a meaningful difference that helps consumers justify spending more.” Nigel Hollis, in his PoV on branding. I once read a statistic that at one point Apple […]
OSS delivery teams can be quite tense environments to work within can’t they? Deadlines, urgency, being in the customer’s line of sight and did I mention deadlines? [As an aside, I’m not sure which type of deadline is more stressful, the ongoing drain of fortnightly releases under Agile, or the chaos of a big-bang release […]
“The cloud model (ie hosted by a trusted partner) becomes attractive from the perspective of repeatability, from the efficiency of doing the same thing repeatedly at scale.” From, “I want a business outcome, not a deployment challenge.” OSS struggles when it comes to repeatability. Often within an organisation, but almost always when comparing between organisations. […]
“Flow, also known as the zone, is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by complete absorption in what one does, and a resulting loss in […]
“I often leverage use-case design and touch-point mapping through the stack to ensure that all of the use-cases can be turned into user-journeys, process journeys and data journeys. This process can pick up the high-level flows, but more importantly, the high-level gaps in your theoretical stack.” Yesterday’s blog discussed the use of use cases to […]
When it comes to designing a multi-vendor (sometimes also referred to as best-of-breed) OSS architecture stack, there is never a truer saying than, “the devil is in the detail.” Oftentimes, it’s just not feasible to design every interface / integration / data-flow traversing a theoretical OSS stack (eg pre-contract award, whilst building a business case, […]
Back in early 2014, PAOSS posted an article about the importance of closed loop designs in OSS, which included the picture below: It generated quite a bit of discussion at the time and led me to being introduced to two companies that were separately doing some interesting aspects of this theoretical closed loop system. [Interestingly, […]
“We can look and take lessons on how services evolved in the cloud space. Our customers have expressed how they want to take these services and want a business outcome, not a deployment challenge.” Shawn Hakl. Make no mistake, cloud OSS is still a deployment challenge (at this nascent stage at least), but in the […]
“Just because you’re afraid of doing something doesn’t give you a permission slip to not do it.” Debbie Millman. There’s a lot of fear in OSS. So many things can go wrong (the OctopOSS theory), so much incompetence is created, so many nearly insurmountable integration challenges await and their complexity means that there is no […]
